


Little Broken Things

by beggingwolf



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: 2012-2013 NHL Season, Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Blood and Injury, M/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-18
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-27 16:29:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30125649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beggingwolf/pseuds/beggingwolf
Summary: Zhenya has always been grateful to be human. He’d had his moments of boyhood jealousy, but years of experience have made him happy to leave the wolves and their particularities to their packs. Zhenya knows enough to keep himself out of trouble—bared teeth mean anger, squinted eyes mean suspicion, ears back mean fear—but most of the time, Sid, Tanger and Pascal are normal hockey players, except for when they run off into the woods of Sewickley around the full moon.And except for when Sid turns up on Zhenya’s property every few months, quiet and watchful and wolfish.
Relationships: Sidney Crosby/Evgeni Malkin
Comments: 20
Kudos: 146





	Little Broken Things

**Author's Note:**

> I very much wanted to write myself a little birthday ficlet. Tragically, I came to this conclusion **on my birthday,** and between birthday Zoom calls, work, and a prodigious amount of eye strain, this is all I've managed... and it's a day late! 
> 
> This fic is unbeta'd (a testament to my lack of self control) and is more of a ficlet; the ending is open and leaves room for continuation if I ever want to come back to it. I really wanted werewolves for my birthday, and since my other werewolf fics are either 1) in the beginning stages and very, very long or 2) just a twinkle in my eye, I had to settle for this! Regardless, I hope you enjoy my birthday gift to myself. Year 2 of pandemic birthdays, woohoo!

Sid shakes his glove as Pascal leads him to the bench. 

That’s what Zhenya notices, after pulling his gaze away from the puddle of blood on the ice. Sid’s glove is gripped in his fingers, his knuckles white, and Sid shakes it back and forth, back and forth, like he’s trying to flick the pain off. 

Stewart guides Sid through the door, and then down the hallway. 

“Don’t shift,” Stewart chants over and over as he passes by the rest of the team. “Don’t shift, Sid, don’t. We need to get a surgeon.”

“That’s broken,” Kuni says grimly as he shoulders his way onto the bench. “That’s fuckin’ broken.”

“Teeth?” Zhenya asks as he watches the rest of the medical staff pick up small white objects from the red-spattered ice.

“Jaw, I think,” Kuni says. 

Zhenya winces, and then one of Stewart’s new assistants runs back out from the locker room, grabbing onto Pascal’s jersey and tugging him away.

“What is going on?” Zhenya asks, and he peers down after them as Pascal starts to jog. 

“Wolf shit,” Vitale says, just as Dan yells at Zhenya’s line to head over the boards.

The whole period is a standoff; Zhenya hates Tavares for no damn reason other than he’s too fancy with the puck and it makes Zhenya’s pride flare. He hits Okposo a bit harder than he needs to in a puck battle along the boards, but it’s scoreless until the period ends. 

Zhenya trundles down the hallway to their locker room, and he can hear Pascal’s voice rising from inside as he chucks his stick into the rack. 

When he gets into the locker room, he sees Pascal kneeling in front of Sid’s locker. On the disgusting floor, burrowed beneath his jersey and the shredded remnants of his undershirt, is Sid. He’s curled up, his muzzle protectively tucked beneath his tail.

“Well, shit,” Zhenya says, and though Pascal can’t understand Russian, he glances over his shoulder to give Zhenya an exasperated look of agreement. 

“Sid,” Stewart pleads from across the room, wisely keeping his distance. 

Sid growls, and Zhenya tugs off his jersey. Sid’s done for the night. 

* * *

Zhenya has always been grateful to be human. He’d had his moments of boyhood jealousy back in Magnitogorsk, where the wolves on his youth team would curl up with each other and nip at ears and paws teasingly. He had seen how fast they’d run in the narrow streets between their homes, and he’d thought it would have been nice to run among them.

Age brought him reason, if not wisdom. The stupid little habits wolves got into were frustrating at best; Zhenya had needed to enter and exit only through certain doors of the Metallurg rink to avoid pissing off Alyosha, who had developed a strange territorial perimeter around one section of the arena, and the break room had been clearly divided into halves while Kukhtinov and Sokolov got into their macho tumbles. 

Still, Zhenya stares down at Sid, who’s skulking on his patio, and feels a small flare of pity.

“This how you finally stop chew through screen door? Need to break face?” Zhenya asks him through the damn screen door, which is the third he’s had to buy since he moved into his house.

Sid doesn’t narrow his eyes. The wolves don’t emote like humans do, and though Zhenya can read the basics, enough that he won’t get himself into hot water—bared teeth for anger, squinted eyes for suspicion, ears back for fear—he’s always made a point to leave the wolves to their wolf things. Sid, Tanger and Pascal are normal hockey players, except for when they run off into the woods of Sewickley around the full moon. 

And except for when Sid turns up on Zhenya’s property every few months, quiet and watchful and wolfish.

“Dan say you out indefinite,” Zhenya says, and Sid just stares up at him. “Can’t say how long, because you wolf, not go to doctor. Stupid, Sid.”

Sid doesn’t move, doesn’t even twitch. He just stares up at Zhenya with those big hazel eyes. The April air hasn’t quite warmed up; it’s the awful gray almost-spring that brings unbearable amounts of rain to Pittsburgh, and Zhenya’s bare feet are starting to get cold from where they peek out under the ragged ends of his sweatpants. Sid waits, and Zhenya rolls his eyes.

“Fine,” he says, and he undoes the latch and slides the screen door open. “Come in, you animal. Don’t get mud on my floors.”

Sid slips into Zhenya’s house as soon as the opening is wide enough, weaving past Zhenya’s legs and into the den.

“Not on couch!” Zhenya calls in English, jamming the screen door shut and then tugging the glass door back into place. It’s still fogged up from Sid’s breath; Zhenya had nearly had a heart attack when he’d seen Sid’s snout pressed up close to the glass, and he had made Sid wait a few minutes in revenge before he even bothered to acknowledge his presence. 

By the time Zhenya gets to his den, Sid is curled up in his favorite chair, the one Zhenya’s ass had been parked in five minutes ago before he’d finally gotten up to open his fridge again and stare into the contents, praying dinner would materialize. 

“Move,” Zhenya says, but it’s half-hearted. He’s not going to win this battle.

Sure enough, Sid just looks at him with one of his bright eyes, his nose tucked under the fluff of his tail.

Sid as a wolf is a dark creature. Zhenya hadn’t expected him to look like this. When he’d heard about Sidney Crosby the werewolf as a child, the way people talked about him made Zhenya expect something grand. A sleek, beautiful beast that stood as tall as a man’s chest, or the majestic gray wolf from the tale of Ivan Tsarevich and the Firebird, maybe. 

He had been at the Igloo a scant few weeks after he had arrived in Pittsburgh when he finally met Sidney Crosby the wolf. He’d been wandering the dingy hallways, completely lost, when the sound of growling had made him warily peer around a corner and catch sight of two wolves brawling.

It had been play fighting, though Zhenya hadn’t really known how to tell the difference at the time. The wolves back in Magnitogorsk were older and only fought when something pissed one of them off. These wolves were practically puppies, as Zhenya would find out. They rolled each other over again and again, flashes of light and dark banging into the walls and trying to get the other belly-up. 

At first he’d thought Crosby had to be the gray wolf. It had been bigger and so light its fur almost shimmered in the poor, dim lighting of the Igloo’s bowels. Surely, Zhenya had thought, the beautiful gray beast had to be Pittsburgh's golden son.

As it turned out, Sid was the smaller wolf, a dark little thing with shaggy brown fur that looked singed at the tips. He’d pinned the gray wolf—Tanger—to the ground and bit at his belly until Tanger’s hind paw caught him under the snout. Zhenya’s certain Sid’s gotten bigger over the years, fully growing into his enormous paws and his comically large ears. His strange coloring, all dark at the tips and bleeding to an almost golden brown at the root, remained.

One of those ears swivels as Zhenya leans over to yank his favorite pillow from beneath Sid’s shoulder, and Zhenya retreats to the couch, remote in hand. 

Sid doesn’t move as Zhenya finishes watching the reruns of last year’s middleweight title fights. Zhenya keeps glancing over at him, desperately curious about the wreckage of Sid’s jaw, but Sid keeps his face hidden, tucked away beneath his paws or his tail. 

For all that Zhenya defers to the trainers, he understands why Sid had shifted. Werewolves heal faster in their wolf forms for reasons too complicated and irrelevant for Zhenya to fully understand. Tanger had attempted something similar when he’d broken his toe, and Zhenya had unfortunately been witness to it as Tanger screamed in pain and gave up on his shift, collapsing into a half-furry ball on the floor of the athletic trainer’s room.

Tanger hadn’t managed the pain of the shift with a broken toe. Sid had gotten through a full shift with his jaw in multiple pieces and his teeth scattered across Consol’s ice. 

Zhenya can’t help but be a little impressed. 

His stomach growls, and he sees Sid’s big ears perk up. 

“I should eat you,” Zhenya sighs. “I’m not feeding you, you know. Can you even eat? How many teeth do you have left?”

Sid’s ears flick this way and that, like he’ll be able to understand Zhenya’s mother tongue. Maybe, Zhenya ponders, Sid isn’t even listening to him. He could be hearing Zhenya’s neighbors to the south, or a deer outside, or the dripping faucet in the guest bathroom that Zhenya still hasn’t called a plumber about. 

When Zhenya heaves himself up off of the couch, Sid watches him pass by. He doesn’t come to investigate when Zhenya finally yanks open his freezer in defeat and grabs the plastic bag full of his mother’s pelmeni, digging a skillet out of his drawers and firing up his stovetop. 

He’s eating his dinner over the counter when Sid finally pads out of the den.

Zhenya pauses mid-chew to look at Sid’s face. He’s seen Sid enough like this over the years, even though Sid doesn’t preen as a wolf like Tanger does. Tanger’s boastful, so proud of his coat and his size, and he prances around the locker room like a prize purebred at a dog show. 

Sid stays a human in front of the team as best as he can. The team, except his little pack of Tanger and Pascal.

And Zhenya. 

Sid’s face looks surprisingly fine. There’s no lumps, nothing that makes it seem like the bones are broken beneath the skin. Zhenya wonders how far along the healing process is. With Sid’s coat still winter-thick, there’s no chance of glimpsing just how bruised his skin is. 

Sid paces into Zhenya’s kitchen slowly, sniffing around the corners. He licks at a few crumbs, and Zhenya makes a face before finishing off his last pelmeni and rinsing off the plate in the sink. 

He’s scrubbing a bit of burnt crust off of the skillet when he feels a paw brush at his foot. 

“What?” Zhenya asks as he skitters his foot away from Sid’s big paws and their sharp claws. It’s even weirder than when Sid noses at him with his cold, wet snout.

Sid chuffs out a breath, and Zhenya makes him wait, scrubbing over the pan once more before putting it into the dishwasher. 

Sid presses the broad flat top of his skull against Zhenya’s thigh, and Zhenya’s hands still. Sid radiates heat when he’s like this, like a little sun, and it bleeds through the thin material of Zhenya’s sweatpants. Sid holds himself against Zhenya for what feels like minutes, and Zhenya just lets him. 

“Sid, you need something?” Zhenya asks him eventually, and Sid’s head slips down and away. 

He slowly walks around Zhenya’s legs, his flank brushing against the back of Zhenya’s knees, and Zhenya twists to look at him.

“You a cat now?” Zhenya asks, and that drives Sid away, his claws clicking on the wood floor. 

Sid had hated Dixie so, so deeply for the brief time Zhenya had her. He’d even avoided smelling Zhenya when Zhenya petted her for too long. Zhenya had taken offense in the moment, but he’d come to understand it better in retrospect. Dixie had been a prickly street cat who only tolerated Zhenya, sometimes veering towards liking him when he offered her scraps of food off of the table. 

Sid, similarly, is as close to a mangy street dog as a werewolf can get, and Zhenya thinks neither of them were very suited to living in a house, much less sharing the space with another half-feral animal.

Zhenya finishes up his dishes and grabs a bottle of Gatorade out of the fridge before going to look for where Sid wandered off to. The daylight is quickly fading, which means it’s usually time for Sid to head home. He doesn’t like walking out alone at night, when the nocturnal wildlife come crawling out and the territorial owl in the trees behind Zhenya’s house takes vengeful shits as close to Sid as possible.

He checks the den, and under the coffee table and then the billiard table, because he’s found Sid there before too. He even checks his home gym, which is horribly unused, and pokes through the guest rooms on his way up the stairs. He hadn’t heard Sid’s normal galloping lope up to the second floor, but maybe his jaw had forced him to be quieter and slower. 

Zhenya pauses before he gets to the master bedroom, and he slowly reaches up a hand and pushes the cracked door open.

“Sid?” He asks, and he peers around. It’s empty, his bedding unmade from where he’d rolled out of it this morning, his closet door ajar like he’d left it.

“Stupid dog,” he sighs out, which is meaner than he wants to be about it. Zhenya steps out into the hallway, closing his bedroom door behind him and heading for his home office. 

He settles back into the heavy faux-leather chair, swivelling to face his gaming setup and booting up the monitor. It’s practically four in the morning back in Moscow, so there’s no chance that Maxim or Petosha or any of his regular crew are up, but Zhenya fires up CS:GO anyways, willing to find a team to join. 

He spends an hour or two dicking around with some college students—he thinks, he can’t really pay attention to all the English chatter while also focusing on the game—before his eyes stop focusing on the screen and he has to call it a night. 

He does one last sweep of the doors of the house, checking to see if Sid is lurking by any of them. When there’s no sign of him, Zhenya just resigns himself to finding a hungry werewolf waiting in his kitchen in the morning and heads to bed. 

He showers quickly, unmotivated to do much else but wash his hair and jerk himself off perfunctorily. He tugs on a loose pair of boxers and one of his oldest t-shirts, a ratty scrap of cloth from his first training camp with the Penguins. 

He gets into bed, tossing his glasses onto his nightstand, and shuts off his light, even if he squints at his phone for too long before actually turning over onto his belly and trying to rest.

When he wakes up, his left side is on fire. 

“Shusha?” Zhenya says groggily, and he tries to twist over onto his side, but the blankets are pinned down.

He has to sit up fully before he can look over and see not Oksana, but Sid’s big wolf form curled up in a tight ball in the middle of his bed.

Zhenya blinks down at Sid, who cracks open an eye to stare back.

“Why the fuck are you in my bed?” Zhenya grunts, and he reaches over to jam his glasses back onto his face.

Sid closes his eye and shifts his legs just a bit closer to his muzzle, almost curling around it defensively. 

“Sid,” Zhenya tries in English. “Go home. Go to your bed.”

Sid doesn’t even twitch.

It’s the start of a long, strange week for Zhenya, where he comes home from practice to Sid sitting on his couch, or his bed, or curled up beneath various tables. Once Dan and the medical staff find out, they keep badgering Zhenya for more information, and Zhenya can only shrug at them.

“He wolf, what he supposed to say?” Zhenya tells them over and over. If Sid were able to talk, Zhenya would get an answer out of him as to why he’s spending his time hogging Zhenya’s favorite throw blanket instead of bothering Tanger or Pascal’s rowdy clan of pups. 

Zhenya doesn’t have much time to ponder it. The Penguins have been injury-laden all season, from Tanger’s groin and then broken toe to Zhenya’s concussion in February, and then the nine games he’d missed in March after Gudbranson crunched him into the glass.

He’d gotten two games back with Sid before Orpik’s shot had taken Sid’s teeth out of his skull and Sid himself out of their lineup.

After practice, Zhenya stops by the Giant Eagle and buys copious amounts of ground beef, since Sid doesn’t need to chew it much and he’s eaten through the stuff from Zhenya’s freezer. He heads home to find Sid lingering by the door.

“I should install a dog door,” Zhenya mutters as Sid scoots past him and loops around the side of Zhenya’s house, for which Zhenya is grateful. If Sid has to shit anywhere, he’d much rather it be in the woods and not on Zhenya’s front lawn. 

He lets Sid wander, closing the door behind him just so Sid will have to yip to get let back in, and restocks his fridge, which looks just as barren as it did last week except with more ground beef. 

Their evening passes much as the others have for the last week; Zhenya putters around, watching TV or playing CS:GO or video chatting with his parents when they’re awake, and Sid lurks around. He moves through Zhenya’s house like a ghost. Zhenya can only hear him when his claws travel over the hardwood floors. 

Zhenya’s team in CS:GO is debating the chances of a gamble stack going well when those claws gently rake over Zhenya’s foot.

“Motherfucker,” Zhenya hisses, jerking away and looking down at Sid, who’s curled up under his desk and has been serving as Zhenya’s reluctant footwarmer for the better part of the last hour. 

“You distract. Go away,” Zhenya tells him, and he looks back up to the screen.

The wet drag of Sid’s tongue makes Zhenya jump entirely out of the chair. 

“Careful with your mouth!” is the first thing he snaps, which isn’t particularly useful unless Sid’s learned Russian, but Sid creeps out of the hollow of Zhenya’s desk and he butts the top of his head against Zhenya’s knee. 

“Stop,” Zhenya complains, trying to swerve around Sid to get back to the game—the party is about to start—but Sid ducks in front of him, warding him off.

Sid advances, and Zhenya takes a step back. 

Sid takes another step, and Zhenya realizes he’s being herded.

“Need go outside?” Zhenya asks wearily, and Sid just coaxes Zhenya out of his office. Instead of heading for the stairs, though, Sid cuts Zhenya off and waits until Zhenya heads in the opposite direction, towards his bedroom. 

Zhenya won’t ever admit to anyone that he allows himself to be put to bed by a scruffy-looking Canadian werewolf. Sid waits him out until he brushes his teeth and gets into bed, and Sid doesn’t even bother hiding under the bed frame. He jumps straight up onto the mattress, where he’ll end up by sunrise anyway, and waits for Zhenya to squirm into the sheets before he gently rests his face on Zhenya’s lower back. 

“Careful,” Zhenya says into his pillow. “Jaw still broke.”

Sid blows out a cool breath that leaks through the thin material of Zhenya’s shirt, and Zhenya shivers. 

“I’m right,” Zhenya adds in Russian. “If you mess up your jaw more, the medical staff are going to be even more pissed off at you.”

Sid lifts his head and Zhenya feels hot, animal-damp breath for barely a second before Sid's undamaged front fang is digging into his shirt and jerking it up. 

“Sid!” Zhenya snaps, and Sid nibbles at the exposed, soft skin at the dip in Zhenya’s back. The scrape of his ruined, jagged teeth makes Zhenya shiver. 

Zhenya jerks to roll over, and Sid lets out a yelp as Zhenya’s hip catches the bottom of his jaw.

“You stupid wolf!” Zhenya snaps at him, and he reaches down for Sid to—

To gently dig his fingers into the thick fur on Sid’s hip. He holds onto Sid, watching as Sid carefully lifts his face away from Zhenya’s body.

“Sid,” Zhenya says, and his voice isn’t quite apologetic—that wasn’t his fault, not at all—but there’s enough care in it that Sid gingerly wags his tail once. 

“Most stupid,” Zhenya says so Sid will understand, and he brushes a hand down Sid’s tail. 

For all that Sid looks scrappy, he’s downy-soft. Zhenya teases down to the last bone in Sid’s tail before mashing his thumb into the fur at the end, and Sid jerks his tail out of Zhenya’s grasp. 

“Stop,” Zhenya tells Sid softly. “If you want sleep, need to sleep. Need to be careful.”

Sid looks at him, and Zhenya has always found it strange that Sid’s eyes are the same in this animal body. They have that same hard crease of bone above them, the same shifting colors that make them look liquid in the dark and golden in the light. 

Right now, though, the sight of Sid’s eyes just makes Zhenya miss him. 

“Hope you come back soon,” Zhenya tells Sid softly, and he pets over the strong tendon in one of Sid’s back legs. “Miss hear you yell _skate, skate_ at whole team.”

Sid gets up, circles twice, and beds down against Zhenya once more. The strong curve of his back presses into Zhenya’s chest, and Sid curls up around his muzzle again. 

Zhenya carefully loops an arm around Sid’s body, his long fingers resting over the tangle of Sid’s paws. 

At least, Zhenya reasons hazily to himself, he has this. He misses the Sid who talks too much, the one who lurks around the rink just like he lurks around Zhenya’s home. 

But this way, Zhenya has a Sid he can hold. Even if he has to settle for the soft brush of fur instead of the warm touch of skin, Zhenya considers himself lucky. 

**Author's Note:**

> Zhenya thinks it's unrequited, despite the fact that Sidney Crosby, Werewolf, is holing up with him while injured and sad. You're right, Zhenya, that definitely doesn't mean anything! Of course! Also Sid is refusing to do anything about his feelings until his lowered-inhibition wolf self slinks away to bother Zhenya. These two share a single brain cell and pass it back and forth as needed. 
> 
> This fic was brought to you by St. Patrick himself and also me missing my family dog (by which I mean he's alive but lives in another state).
> 
> The title is from the [little broken raptor teeth](https://rimouskis.tumblr.com/tagged/little-broken-raptor-teeth) tag. 
> 
> [Video of the injury](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj8AbjJqcCM)  
> [2012-2013 Penguins Season](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%9313_Pittsburgh_Penguins_season)  
> [Tsarevitch Ivan, the Firebird and the Gray Wolf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsarevitch_Ivan,_the_Firebird_and_the_Gray_Wolf)  
> [CS:GO Dictionary](https://dotesports.com/counter-strike/news/csgo-slang-guide-dictionary-23242) because I am definitely not a gamer.
> 
> Come say hi on [Tumblr!](https://beggingwolf.tumblr.com)


End file.
